Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Despite having sophisticated causal reasoning skills, there are a variety of cases in which adult learners consistently ignorethe available evidence and make an incorrect inference. Here, we focus on a specific case in which adults fail to inferand apply a conjunctive causal rule (Lucas et al., 2014), and examine two explanations for this failure. In Experiment1, we manipulate information about the probabilistic nature of the events to test whether adults failure results from anendorsement of noisy relations. In Experiment 2, we manipulate the physical design of the causal system to test analternative account: that this phenomenon is due to a failure to consider the correct, conjunctive hypothesis. Takentogether, our results suggest that failures to learn the conjunctive rule may not be entirely due to a noisy prior that affordsdiscounting of the evidence, but instead results from a failure to generate the relevant hypothesis.